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Thursday, August 14, 2014

Photographing Miniatures Part 4 - Interlude

Hi All,

Things on the photography front have not gone apace here at the corner. Yesterday I tried to buy some inexpensive lights to use for back lighting a la Giovanni Azzara, but I didn't want to pay $20 per lamp and all of the $5 lamps had sold out due to the back to school sales.

What I did find this morning, however, was another resource which I think is worth a look.

That page has an excellent explanation of Exposure Value (EV) and what settings to use to get pictures to not look so dark on a white background. They also give you the same tips that I've been giving you about lighting and tripods etc. And the "Hard/ Soft" Light test is genius. They are trying to sell you a light box and other equipment, but the advice is rock solid as far as I can see.

One other point they stress, know how to focus your camera. This is actually a very big deal, especially if you have auto focus. One of the common errors I see in photos of minis is people taking the time to set up the shot and then not paying attention where the focus point is. Maybe you really do want that tree behind you figure in focus instead of the figure, I don't know. Use the trick of pressing the shutter half way to set the focus and then position the camera for the shot.

And because it sort of came up in a comment from the last post, here is a scaled down version of the shot from the Fuji, instead of a close cropped version.

In and of itself, not bad. Just too far away. I doubt many of you are going to use a clunker like this one so it's really all academic.

And a welcome to two new followers:

Panzer Kaput of Panzerkaput's Painted Review. The very talented artist who did Loki's blog header and the Bloggers for Charity logo. He's also got some fantastic looking buildings for VBCW on the blog right now.

Mark G of The Repple Depple Clubhouse has some lovely hotspot markers for 20mm (1/72) games of Force on Force. Hopefully I'll have a chance to dig through his site in the future.